I’ve had motorcycle accidents – I had one where I ended up in intensive care. But if you are on a frontline – which I have been – and people start shooting at you – which they have done – you put yourself in quite considerable danger. So: on a moving frontline in northern Afghanistan in 2001.
How close have you come to death?
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Throat and neck cancer in 2018. They told me six to eight months if it hadn’t been caught.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 210 →
Ronald Harwood
South African playwright and novelist
Having a heart attack two days after my wife’s funeral.
Jeremy Deller
English artist
Three squaddies on a train in 1995.
Marc Almond
English singer
The motorcycle crash, but also when a neon sign fell on my head in Soho in the 90s.
More from Mark Radcliffe
View profile →Working in a bottle factory, which lasted one day, and the Radio 1 breakfast show.
The Radio 1 breakfast show was an embarrassing moment that lasted for nine months.
Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
Nothing. I survived a cancer scare at 60, so I am just overjoyed to be here.
Fairly decent bloke.
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